Encarna, the youngest of five siblings, was born in the little town of Carboneras, Almería on the Southeastern coast of Spain where a small square a few metres from the beach is named after her.

In 1970, Encarna accepted a contract in Mexico and later worked for stations in the Dominican Republic and Los Angeles while she was studying radio production for the ABC network.

Though relatively popular in Madrid and Barcelona when she returned to Spain, Encarna was not a 'coast-to-coast' radio host yet, as Luis del Olmo, who had a program with that name, already was.

For some months, in her four-year fight, she flew daily to Switzerland for treatment in the morning to be at her desk in Madrid at 4 p.m. for the millions who had made it into a habit to tune into COPE to listen to the four-hour show.

Once she started to fail to host more and more shows, speculation about her health began to spread in early 1996 as her listeners were given little information about a situation Encarna wanted to keep pretty much to herself by asking the few friends who knew about it not to reveal it was cancer.

The best known sketch of the duo was about a confused mum, calling Encarna's nightly show while frying small pies to talk about her two sons and their military service in Móstoles, a suburban town near Madrid.

The sketch evolved into complete confusion when the lady, who is never seen on stage, mixed up all the details of her conversation and even said that she was frying the two sons and that Móstoles was on fire.

The sketch basically ridiculed working-class women in trouble to make their point in the short span of the phone call, the so-called 'marujas' in Spain, who made up much of Encarna's audience.

The problem came a few years afterwards when the subject of ridicule was not the audience but Encarna herself and her close friend, famous folk singer Isabel Pantoja.